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Re:drinking D2O



Barlow Newbolt asked " Years ago I read that an animal with only heavy
water to drink would die of thirst. . . . Is this statement true?"

About 15 years ago, I heard a presentation about a research program
at Argonne National Lab concerning the effects of deuterium on
living systems. I have not been able to find my notes from the talk,
so the following is my recollection.
The purpose of the work was to study metabolism in large mammals
(they used Beagles in the study) by substituting deuterium for hydrogen
in the animals' makeup. The animals drank heavy water and the fraction
of deuterium replacing hydrogen in the animals' tissue was measured.
They observed how this affected the rates of various biochemical
processes in the animals. As I recall, deuteration fractions in the range
30-50% killed the animals.
As to why this happens, I found reference to a paper (Kihara & McCray,
Biochim. biophys. Acta 292, 297-309 (1973).) in which the
authors found that reconstituting freeze-dried bacteria and mitochondria
with D2O instead of H2O increased oxidation/reduction times of cytochrome b & c
by a factor of sqrt(2) (see Quantum Mechanical Tunneling
in Biological Systems by Don DeVault, pa 46). So the animals don't die
of thirst, but their metabolism rates are sufficiently perturbed that
they don't survive.

Russ Hilleke
Physics Dept
The Citadel